Description
What does it cost to truly surrender? What remains when every excuse has been burned away? In thirteen raw, unguarded poems, written outside Washington, D.C., and in Hilo, Artesius Meltin Aloka takes the reader on a journey no comfortable religion can provide.
These are not poems of easy grace. They are the cries of a soul in the furnace, confessing, warning, longing, and finally resting in the One who pursued it across decades of wandering. The collection opens at a mirror, asking whether the face it shows is Christ's or a carefully kept image of the self, and closes with the nine-line whisper of Life is Short. Between the two, Aloka names his own past without euphemism, prison and theft included. He builds a poem on an escalating litany of "if," reaches toward bridal longing in Beloved of YAH, and turns a confession about prayer reduced to "friendly mind chatter" into a warning for his neighbors in Hilo, where the lava is no metaphor.
Each poem is paired with a literary commentary that opens the spiritual and theological depths beneath the verse, often by way of Scripture. A closing reflection, On Entering the Flow, gathers the thirteen around the image that gives the book its title. The Holy Flow is never defined in the abstract. It is earned through surrender, through tears, through the long dying of a self that insists on arriving by its own strength, and it is found by ceasing to seek everything that stands in its place.
Aloka writes as watchman, penitent, and mystic, sometimes in the same breath: confessional when he examines his own failures, prophetic when he warns against cheap grace, pastoral in the compassion beneath every warning. Seeking the Holy Flow is for those who are tired of performance and hungry for the real, who have heard the knock at the door and are ready to open it.
Artesius Meltin Aloka is a poet, healer, and prophetic voice whose fifty-year spiritual journey traces the arc of this collection. Since 2021 he has lived off-grid in a treehouse one hundred yards from Kīlauea's eastern rift zone on Hawaiʻi Island.
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